Mantra is a compact workstation which enables you to phenotype immune cells in situ in solid tumors using multiplexed biomarkers.

Traditional methods like flow cytometry and next-generation sequencing allow you to phenotype and quantify immune cells in homogenized samples, but you lose critical spatial information and context. Meanwhile, standard pathological analyses can deliver morphology data but do not allow the analysis of complex phenotypes.

With multispectral imaging, you can phenotype and quantify immune cells from images of FFPE tissue sections, maintaining tissue architecture, cellular spatial relationships and morphological context. This capability available on the Mantra provides spatial information, allowing for a better understanding of the role and types of immune cells within both the tumor and the tumor microenvironment so that new cancer immunotherapy treatments may be identified and researched.

The Mantra workstation is ideal for labs getting started with multispectral imaging and for assay development, allowing higher throughput systems such as Vectra® Polaris™ to be freed up. It incorporates multispectral imaging technology, image acquisition and analysis with the inForm® software, and can be used with a variety of stains including PerkinElmer's Opal™ reagent kits.

The Mantra workstation is a part of PerkinElmer’s integrated Phenoptics™ workflow solution for immuno-oncology which includes staining reagents, imaging systems, and image analysis software.

Together, the in situ multiplexed biomarker staining, imaging systems such as Mantra, and image analysis software enable cell phenotypes to be simultaneously studied in solid tumors and their microenvironment. That allows for the quantification of cancer-immune interactions, revealing which disease mechanism is at play—to help discover and validate biomarkers and providing better data to support research into potential subpopulation stratification methodologies.